Thursday, April 13, 2017

Open Context Announcement: New Data Sharing Project Focuses on Zooarchaeology of the Levant

We are happy to announce the kick-off of a large-scale data integration project, provisionally titled The Biometrical Database of Levantine Fauna.
This project’s goal is to build up a massive body of openly-available
zooarchaeological data from the Levant, with a specific focus on
measurement data, in order to facilitate and improve research and
instruction worldwide. This project represents a collaboration among
many colleagues located across the globe, who recognize the research and
teaching potential of access to large databases of related content.
Zooarchaeology is particularly amenable to data sharing because
practitioners collect large quantities of data in somewhat more
“standardized” formats than seen in other archaeological
sub-disciplines. The data will be published in Open Context, where it
will be available openly for download and reuse, and linked to related
content both in Open Context and across the Web. All data contributors
will be clearly cited, both for the overall project and for each
individual specimen.

This project is open to anyone collecting primary zooarchaeological
(or related) data from sites of any period in the Levant and adjacent
areas. Its success relies on broad participation from the zooarchaeology
community. If this resource sounds exciting to you for your research, please contribute to it! We
are currently reaching out to gauge the level of participation. In late
spring 2017, we will send details to interested participants of the
kind of data we would like you to submit, as well as instructions on how
to prepare datasets for publication with Open Context. This will be an
ongoing project, so please get in touch with us if you are interested in
participating now or in the future! Please contact Justin Lev-Tov (Project Manager) or Sarah Whitcher Kansa (Open Context Editor) for more information.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.